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Google Debuts Pixel, a Premium Touchscreen Chromebook

Google's Pixel is a Chromebook unlike any other before it in terms of build quality, performance and price.

Photo: Michael Calore/Wired

SAN FRANCISCO – The Pixel, a new Chromebook built and designed by Google that has been the source of web rumors for weeks, is real. And, as also has been rumored, it’s a Chromebook unlike any other – premium hardware, high performance and a high-resolution touchscreen display.

It won’t come cheap. Pricing starts at $1,300 for a Wi-Fi-only version, which will be available in the United States and United Kingdom, and $1,450 for a Verizon LTE-capable version to be sold in the United States. Google is making the Pixel available for pre-order Thursday, and it will ship the first week in April.

>“We really wanted to step back and say, ‘For a user who lives in the cloud, what is the best computer we can design?” — Sundar Pichai, Google

Like other Chromebooks, the devices will be sold both through Google Play and at Best Buy stores. Unlike other Chromebooks, however, which are available for as little as $200, it’s not a budget device for students or something for people who want a second or third computer for using around the house. It’s a top-shelf laptop crafted from premium materials and components intended for power users.

“We really wanted to step back and say, ‘For a user who lives in the cloud, what is the best computer we can design,” said Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of Chrome at the Pixel’s launch event here.

Pichai says his team started working on the Pixel two years ago with the intent of “rethinking everything that’s possible with a laptop.”

With that charge in mind, the Pixel introduces some new ideas, and a few older ones too. The exterior design is impressive: an austere rectangular block of aluminum with subtly rounded edges. The black, inset, squared keys bring Apple MacBooks to mind. The implementation of a touch display can’t be found on Apple laptops yet, but it’s increasingly common on newer Windows 8 machines. But nothing from Apple or the world of Microsoft is quite like the Pixel.

The touchscreen ditches the 16:9 aspect ratio found on most laptops in favor of a 3:2 display that’s more friendly to web browsing.

The touchscreen measures 13 inches and rocks a density of 239 pixels per inch, which results in a resolution of 2560 x 1700 pixels for a total of 4.3 million pixels. And, as expected, discerning individual pixels on the device isn’t easy. The screen is gorgeous.

“Why we call it Pixel is because we don’t want users to have to deal with the Pixel,” Pacahi said. “With the pixel, you can reach out, you can pan and zoom and it feels much more natural and intuitive as a user.”

Photo: Michael Calore/Wired

Powering all this is an Intel Core i5 CPU with integrated graphics (scrolling on webpages is very smooth) and it has some on-board storage in the form of a solid-state drive – 32GB for the Wi-Fi model and 64GB for the LTE variant. Google is throwing in 1TB of free Google Drive storage space for three years. Pichai said three years is roughly the expected lifetime of the device. Battery life on the Pixel will come in at about five hours.

There are no visible speaker grilles; they’re hidden below the keyboard. Cooling vents can’t be seen either – they’re hidden behind the display hinge. There are also no icons labeling the i/o ports. The touchpad is glass – a first for a Chromebook. Dual microphones are built into the display, but we haven’t been able to spot them. There's a third mic under the keyboard to help with noise cancelling.

Pichai said the the goal with Pixel is to provide a premium laptop, at a premium price, but also to edge the Chrome ecosystem and web development toward the bleeding edge of computing, which demands touchscreens and high-resolution displays.

“We think our ecosystem will respond with a whole generation of new touchscreen devices,” he said.

But this doesn’t mean that touchscreen ChromeOS devices will eventually compete with Android, Pichai said.

"We have two view points here and we are doing both. This may enable the applications to even look the same across platforms and users don't even care about the underlying technology.”

Whether or not the Pixel can actually sell in any significant numbers is an, as yet, unanswered question. Pichai wouldn’t disclose specific sales numbers for any Chromebooks, but he said he believes that the appetite for a high-end Chromebook is there, noting that since Google and Samsung launched their $250 Chromebook 125 days ago, that specific computer has been the best selling laptop on Amazon every single day.

“This is targeted for a segment of users who have committed to the cloud,” he said of the $1,300 Pixel. “We believe we’ve built the best laptop from a hardware standpoint.”